Sun widens its lead in Unix server market

A global increase in demand for its entry-level systems has resulted in Sun Microsystems bringing home top scores and widening its lead over competitive vendors in the Unix server market.

This was announced by International Data Corporation's (IDC) first Server Tracker report for 2000 which stated that Sun shipped twice as many Unix servers as HP and nearly three times as many as IBM - ending the first quarter with a 38 percent market share.

According to Tertius Bezuidenhout, national systems engineer manager at Sun Microsystems SA, that this is the 12th consecutive quarter that Sun leads in Unix server shipments is no surprise and is in line with the company's growth statistics in SA.

"Since Sun returned to SA in 1992 our share of the market has grown enormously. In SA we are probably growing at the same rate, if not quicker, in the high-end server market than other countries in the world. For example, with our Starfire servers we recently experienced a record quarter and completed the last financial year with a more than 300 percent increase in Starfire E1000 shipments," says Bezuidenhout.

He believes that delivering on scalability and reliability has set Sun apart from competitive products whilst setting new performance benchmarks in the SAP/R3 environment has helped the growth factor.

According to the IDC report, Sun was also number one in Unix server revenue with 32 percent market share - a category the company has led for five consecutive quarters.

The report reinforces Sun's leading position in the Unix server market where the architecture continues to be voted "most popular" Unix platform with corporate data centres as well as fast-growing service provider, e-commerce and dot-com companies.

Customers are looking for high service levels, at low service cost and with low risk - all while managing unpredictable user workloads and changing application environments. And Sun servers with the UltraSPARC processors and Solaris Operating Environment are delivering the highest grades.

"Sun's aggressive, focused and seamless strategy continues to be a key differentiator and a competitive advantage as we're obviously aceing the test with customers," says Shahin Khan, vice president, product marketing and planning of system products at Sun.

"Sun servers offer a unique blend of scalability and binary compatibility that is helping us grow faster than our competition."

Sun posted 51 percent higher shipments and 27 percent more revenue in the first quarter of 2000 than in the same period last year, and in the process outpaced its nearest rivals in both Unix and total (Unix, Windows NT and other platforms) server markets.